Nadezhda Durova - Legacy

Legacy

Durova's descendants seem to have inherited her talent for training animals. Nadezhda's great-grandsons Vladimir and Anatoly Durov were the famous Russian circus animal trainers and founders of the Durov Animal Theater in Moscow. Currently the Theater is run by another descendant of Nadezhda, Natalia Durova.

Durova's gender identity has been a source of recent interest. Her adoption of a masculine persona extended far enough that her son had to address her as "Dear Parent" when he asked her consent to get married. Some readers interpret her as a cisgender woman who adopted celibacy and male clothing to achieve professional freedom. Others see sexual overtones to her cross dressing. The text of her memoir conforms to the mores of the era and asserts chastity.

Besides being a rare example of a female soldier's military memoir, The Cavalry Maiden is one of the few sustained accounts of the Napoleonic wars to describe events from the perspective of a junior officer and one of the earliest autobiographical works in Russian literature.

Durova became a figure of some cultural interest in Eastern Europe but remained largely unknown to the English speaking world until Mary Fleming Zirin's translation of The Cavalry Maiden in 1988. Durova is now a subject of university syllabi and scholarly publications in comparative literature, Russian history, and transgender studies.